Affiliate Blog » PPC

Bing vs Google

Affiliate Blogger — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 22:17:11 +0000

I’ve been mulling over what might happen as a result of the MSN Yahoo merger which basically means that MSN’s Bing will now be powering Yahoo’s search whilst Yahoo provides the ’social media conduit. Essentially this means that MSN and Yahoo are both playing to their online strengths. And means that there is finally some real competition offered against Google.

Whilst on the surface it seems that this might be something that would cause a stir, in reality its an empty vessel, particularly in the UK, Europe and USA, where google dominates, so much so that Google-it has entered out lexicon as a term for searching online. In Asia and other regions however i can appreciate that this move might be more of a threat to Google, but the fact remains, consumers (in this case users searching on the web) will always gravitate towards the best possible product to achieve their desire. And lets face it, Google is amazingly good at its job. Having done several tests and comparisons with Bing versus Google, you have to admit Googles search algorithm is far more sophisticated and considered than that of MSN.

In essence this Bing ‘threat’ only really applies to PPC and paid search, which represents the revenue streams for Both Bing and Google, and even here, Google is the dominant for based on its sophisticated Adwords tool. In reality, even here, I doubt much will change in terms of googles dominance other than we might keep more of an eye on future developments on the Bing arena.

As far as affiliates are concerned, this might give raise to a group of affiliate who focus solely on Bing rather than Google, whilst the margins and reach might be smaller, equally the competition might be less aggressive…now thats a thought!

PPC Trial

Affiliate Blogger — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 19:45:09 +0000

I’ve recently setup an atomic niche affiliate site in very much the same way as seamaster did, selling 1 product with a .co.uk URL with only the model number, i selected a few ‘exact match’ keywords all containing the keyword (the model number) and i set the ads to run for a specific 5 hours of the day 7 days a week and its been going since sunday, overall there’s only been a trickle of clicks and even impressions and the cost despite a max. spend of £5.00 a day has added up to a whopping £0.80 since sunday, with CTR being around 1.5%

this is my first proper and detailed look at PPC as an affiliate so hopefully this test will result in a sale or two and pave the way for a more aggressive experiment.

Converting CPM to CPA

PPC tips

Affiliate Blogger — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:51:32 +0000

I’m definately no expert in PPC, my expereinces in this area are limited to say the least, primarily to keey my account with CJ open, but PPC is a real art that just needs to be mastered and there are some great experts in PPC out there, Kristy is one such affiliate, she’s now full time and targeting the UK market from the sunny beaches of australia, shes made it to that much saught after full time affiliate status where her affiliate income covers her own wages. here, she goes into some detail about PPC as an affiliate and offers some good insight into how to manage a PPC campaign as an affiliate.

Smingles SEO tips

Useful Tools for affiliate marketers

Affiliate Blogger — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 10:13:06 +0000

Affiliate marketing is a fast paced game, you need to constantly be building up your sites with the most relevant content as quickly as possible and be trying to get your site to rank as high as possible in the search engines, I’ve always found the efficency is what makes all the difference, and the quicker and easier you can get things do, the sooner you can go to the park and play with your friends. So, here’s a list of the tools that help me with my affiliate marketing, not just in terms of efficency but also in terms of site construction and so forth.

1. Google.com- Self explaintory really, without google the internet wouldn’t be what it is.

2. Adsense- at least at the moment, adsense gives me the bulk of my affiliate commissions, its not a big earner, but it does offer some stability and continuity and its totally automated which means I don’t need to spend time selecting merchants or installing scripts.

3. Google Analytics- This is googles reporting tool, its incredibally functional and helps you to determine how well your site is performing, where traffic has come in from and all sorts of cool number crunching stuff, its invaluable as a bench marking tool of your sites performance, and it can be integrated with adsense.

4. Wordze- this is an awesome keyword research tool, which is similar to google keyword except its more extensive and designed for use by PPC professionals and Affiliates, it offers some real indepth analysis which is great for finding new niches and understanding how people are serching. it costs around USD$40.oo a month, but if you’re big into niche marketing or PPC this is a really good tool to use.

5. Hitwise - Hitwise is the mecca of all research tools, it rocks, but it costs an arm and a leg, if ever get a change to look at it, take full advantage of it, the insight tenfold that of any other research tool.

6. Google Keyword tool – this is a free tool that google provides for PPC to estimate traffic volumes and costs, but its useful for affiliate and niche marketing as well for research and estimates. Its great for finding new niches as I explained here.

7. Easy Content Unit – I’ve only recently started using this, despite being aware of the potential of datafeeds for years. ECU basically allows you to automate the process of creating content widgets on your site, good for creating top ten product lists, best seller lists and comparison tables, with little effort, one of the big headaches is you still need to wait to get approved from th networks, as I’ve mentioned before. But its the closest we’ve come to something like this and I have to admit, as a total dunce at anything techical this is a fantastic tool.

8. Easy Co-reg – this is similar to ECU but for CPL (Cost per lead) campaigns, great if you’ve got an email collection form of some sort.

9. Google Alerts – getting the latest news is a big challenge for affiliates with content heavy sites, google alerts is one of the top tools to get the most relevent news as quickly as possible on relevant subjects.

10. sqworl – another tool, i’ve just started using, its bascally a bookmarking tool that you can login to anywhere, great for the mobile affiliate, just for keeping tabs on all those important URLs you have, including these ones on this page.

11. Wordpress – this is a CMS (content management system), my personal favourate, its dead easy to install and gives a fantastic and highly customizable blog platform, which, with a little creativity can be made and structured to fit as a normal website, the multitude of plugins and themes means that no two wordpress blogs are alike.

12. A4U forum – this is the UK industry forum, i find this one of the most useful resources on the web for anything affiliate marketing related, and its still small enough that you don’t get swamped with information and spam like you do with other forums, they also host the annual A4uAwards which is an awesome black tie event with affiliates, networks, merchants and agencies, not to be missed, and they run the A4u expo, another great affiliate event.

13. Twitter – I haven’t used this for affiliate marketing yet, but I’ve tested it and seen some very successful uses of twitter in affiliate marketing, the main reason for my lack of use is the time and frequecy twitter needs to be maintained, which is a real turn off when I’ve got as much as I do on my plate, still it is still a new and innovative tool and worth using, basically its micro-blogging, that allows you to post small paragraph length comments to your followers.

14. FileZilla – filezilla rocks, its a free ftp solution that allows you to manage all your files on the server, it makes uploading plugins and themes to wordpress dead easy and its really clear, of course, best of all, its free.

15. FireFox – Firefox is awesome, its a free browser with the functionality to add add-ons, giving it a wordpress like freedom to customize and improve workflow and functionality, its long since replaces safari and internet explorer as my browser of choice and its not failed me yet!

16. Outlook – as an affiliate you’re sure to get millions of emails a day, litreally hundreds and thousands of them, its insane, being able to keep track of multiple email accounts and not rely on yahoo or gmail is a real lifesaver.

17. Skimlinks – I’m pretty lazy, it takes time to get approved for merchants, write articles and build up an affiliate site, and time isn’t something I have a lot of, and the little i have i need to use as efficently as possible. What this means is waiting for a merchant to approve me is a waste of time, having to look on the 20 odd networks in the uk is a waste of time. and this is where skimlinks comes in, its a tool that amalgamates all the major networks and affiliate programs in one place, you don’t need to worry about tracking links, you just install a little javascrpt and link to merchants as normal, all the technical leg work is done for you.

18. youtube – this is an unsung hero of affiliate marketing, you can get information from there, post videos for backlinks on there, and best of all use the videos as part of your content, under explored in my opinion.

19. wikipedia another great source of information content and sometimes even traffic (if you’re lucky) its a great site and whilst non-commercal and totally anti-affiliate its great for information.

20. Yahoo answers – awesome for finding information, getting backlinks, building your own profile and helping others, again, not widely used and under explored.

Why I got into affiliate marketing

Affiliate Blogger — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:50:35 +0000

I’ve always been entrepreneural even from a young age when i got caught selling baseball cards in school. Leaving Uni with not much of a degree in graphic design i was at a loss as to what to do with my life, it dawned on me i wasn’t much of a graphic designer and my design skills were best left to gather dust. It was at this point I fell into affiliate marketing, I was an avid fan of the internet anyways having been a moderator on a fairly large internet forum, so I knew my way around and in my youth i had created a geocities site before. So I jumped at the chance of a Job when an opening at an affiliate network became available. (I’d got this job through a friend).

After over 9 months learning the ropes and understanding affiliate marketing I was also looking at how much some of the bigger affiliates were making and seeing their sites it seemed like such an acheivable opportunity. I found myself wishing that instead of worrying about dating, instead of worrying about skateboarding and music, I should have been doing this affiliate marketing thing-a-ma-jiggy.

It wasn’t until I moved to another agency and discovered Squidoo that I really began being a part-time affiliate. At this new job I was in control of an affiliate site, so my understanding of SEO and PPC grew from here, without this knowledge I would have been gropeing around in the dark. Using Squidoo, I ended up creating quite a few test sites, none did really great, but i did get some google adsense commission which proved the concept and allowed me to understand the basics of what it was like to be an affiliate.

In October 2008 I started my real adventure as a part-time affiliate, I’d discovered Wordpress by this point and acquired top-notch webhosting from Netmotivated (a company I heavily recommend by the way), and I’d started to understand SEO and Niche marketing, an area that I’ve decided to focus on. It seems strange but every thing prior to October 2008 was testing and learning.

My first big break came when I discovered a niche as a result of an article in The Sun, what began as a small blog has now become the authority site on the subject and now earns me a consistant income every day of every month, totalling £xxx each month. This was the proof of concept, whilst this blog was fantastic it still needs constant updating and traffic has begun to reach its limit. Furtunately I’ve dedicated more resources to aquiring new domains and exploring SEO further, this has ment that I now have a portfolio of over 70 domains and over 8 active sites.

My second renaissance was when a niche site i created ranked in google in 6 hours, and made a sale worth £xxx within the week i set it up.

My hope, now that I have the knowledge and experience as a result of my professional life and my hobby, is that i can begin to grow this success to earning me a substatial passive income i can use to fund my retirement, or better yet allow me to transition from being a part-time affiliate to a full time affiliate…that would be nice.